Big Guns Jump on Open-Source Bandwagon for New Web Apps

Hoping to win the hearts and minds of millions of internet programmers, the giants of the software industry are starting to sing a new song: Free your software and developers will follow.

Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems and even Microsoft are starting to embrace the ideals of the open-source software movement, releasing software under liberal licenses in a bid to dominate the next-generation web.

At this week's JavaOne Conference in San Francisco, Sun said it will open-source its JavaFX Script programming language later this year -- a bold step for a company that has traditionally been slow to dive into the open-software arena. Meanwhile, Adobe has released open-source programming tools for its competing Flash technology, and Microsoft, the beast of Redmond, has released code for Silverlight, it's Flash killer, under its own liberal license.